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September 06, 2015

This Hilarious Meme Will Infuriate All Those Bernie Sanders Supporters BIG TIME

What does socialism mean in America? Some recent events suggest we haven’t a clue. …

What makes Sanders’s socialist candidacy so remarkable is that it’s been decades since the term has functioned as anything other than abuse. Perhaps bravely, Sanders still takes pride in that political label, and repeated in interviews last week that he is a “democratic socialist”.

Judging him by his stated policies and public positions, socialism Sanders-style has a mild, Nordic flavor: capitalism will go on on but with more stringent regulation, higher taxes will be introduced, and greater responsiveness to democratically elected governments will be sought. His 12-point plan envisions building infrastructure, ensuring equal pay for women, making it easier to create worker cooperatives, introducing a carbon tax and reducing the cost of college.

Maria Svart, the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America, rightly notes that in other political cultures, or in conversations on the left, this wouldn’t be called socialism at all, but social democracy. In short, it amounts to Europe (or an image of its recent past) in America. …

Like Trump on the Republican side, his current support may derive from the fact his own party’s frontrunner does not appear to be able to lie straight in bed. …

Sanders will, in all likelihood, lose the nomination. But by gathering people together who believe, as Svart puts it, that “the world doesn’t have to be the way it is”, he may be building something that has a far longer life than his presidential tilt.